I've been throwing around this term "furniture text" as if it means something. (Results 1 - 10 of about 2,080 for "furniture text"; result 19 is this blog, none of the rest seem relevant.) It's loosely based on Erik Satie's concept of "musique d'ameublement", translated as "furniture music", his concept of background or ambient music, to be, at best, half-listened to.
But I'm drawing on my own experiences with furniture music. I think of it as music to be grazed, music which rewards active but inattentive listening, where moments of sense or clarity or beauty, moments of interest, might occasionally bubble up. But furniture music prevents you from fully immersing yourself in it. It encourages floating, rather than swimming (or drowning). And by preventing you from total immersion in it, it retains its status as something that is there, a piece of furniture, rather than fooling you into thinking you're being "transported to another world". It becomes a form of meditation, but one that keeps you grounded in your present situation.
This is, I assume, not quite how Erik Satie thought of it. That's OK.
It might be a bit closer to how John Cage thought of it, though. He was a Satie booster; he organized the first public performance of "Vexations" and reworked Satie's "Socrate" into his own "Cheap Imitation".
Cage was a great producer of what I'd consider furniture texts. "Mureau", above, is a piece written through writings of Henry David Thoreau. (I'm not going to the specifics of the process because discussion of these types of pieces always get bogged down with the specifics of the process, as if it's a strategy to avoid reading the works!) You can graze over the text for snippets of sensible fragments, mixed in with a hum of less sensible fragments.
The title is a portmanteau of "music" and "Thoreau"; the piece is a mix of Cage's and Thoreau's sensibilities. As you might expect from Cage, the text is intended to also work as a score for performance. You can listen to Cage read a sample of "Mureau" at Ubu (mp3). Sensible bits, nearly-sensible bits, and not-at-all sensible bits carry you along as you float.
If I felt up to it, I'd talk about "active but inattentive" listening (or reading), the kind that furniture music (or text) encourages, and how it problematizes the suspicious binary of "active" and "passive", or maybe I'd tie it in with some half-understood Buddhist precepts, or even with advanced channel-surfing techniques. But all that seems, I dunno, obvious.
But also: I suspect a lot of people who don't regularly attend poetry readings think that this kind of listening is not appropriate for such a lofty art form, or find it too similar to "being bored", or feel intimidated because they couldn't "make sense" of "everything". Which is a shame, because it's a mode of paying attention that I really enjoy, and I appreciate poetry that encourages it.
(To be continued. Also, sorry for the atrocious title.)
Jordan Scott pointed me towards Parasitic Ventures Press and I am completely enamored. If someone wants to get me a copy of Michael Maranda's Wittgenstein's Corrections [pdf], which consists of Wittgenstein's handwritten corrections to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with the text of the Tractatus erased, leaving only the corrections behind... Daaaaaamn! That would be nice. But the whole catalog is filled with goodies, check it out.
These are old.
This is the oldest manuscript of mine that I'd bother with. These are based on old poems. The Constellated Sonnets is a series of 150 poems in which all the words in each line but one are erased from Shakespeare's sonnets. The punctuation, as you'll see, is left behind. The words were randomly left behind; there was a second sequence that I started, The Collected Sonnets, which was going to feature words that I intentionally selected, but those were so much more boring that I abandoned the process after about a dozen poems.
Then, a few years later, I found out (by stumbling upon his book in the Strand) that Stephen Ratcliffe had done something remarkably similar a few years before I had. Then, a few more years later, Jen Bervin did something remarkably similar, and received a fair amount of acclaim for it. Perhaps there are a few other such projects floating about. Perhaps it is a hopelessly obvious thing to write.
Well, there are some differences between all three texts. Mine is the most rigorous, but also I think mine is the only one that uses a random method on the text; Bervin's prints the "unused" portions of the text greyed out, which allows more interplay between the original and her erased version. None of us, unless I misremember, did all 154 sonnets, but I came closest.
Nevertheless, I believe mine is the only manuscript that you can download in its entirety: The Constellated Sonnets.
For a while I was interested in "interestingness". For a while I was interested in "infinity". For a while I thought that it would be interesting to create a work that was infinitely long but which, to someone (probably me), for some reason, by some metric, might be interesting along its entire length.
This was the closest I came. Keep Walking is probably impossible to read to one's self and get any pleasure out of. It is more of a script or a score than a poem, or more of a performance poem. For a while I was thinking about Morton Feldman and issues of scale and repetition and variation. For a while I was thinking about how we evaluate poetry, and the impossibility of engaging with "the total object", the poem in all its senses and manifestations, the elusiveness, and how being "elusive" relates to being "interesting".
I have never performed this entire piece aloud, but in order to get a sense of what it would sound like, I had the computer read it, and the computer's cool and clinical voice worked nicely with the text, and so, pending a human reading, I offer it to you. It is four hours long. It could have been longer, but I didn't think it would continue being interesting.
I would read the whole thing on request, though. It would, I hope, be interesting.
Download the pdf of Keep Walking. Or, perhaps better yet, listen to the mp3 (4 hours, 84Mb).
Nick Montfort has implemented a text-creating program called "The IBM Poem" written by Emmett Williams in 1966. I am not entirely sure I can describe the algorithm clearly, but basically you seed the program with a bit of text, and then the program expands the text by looking at each letter of the text and adding something to the end of the text based on what that letter is.
OK, that wasn't clear. But you start with a word like "IBM". You then start with the first letter in the text, "I". You look up on your table that when you have an "I" you add, say, "ibis" to the end. Now your text is "IBM ibis". Then the next letter is "B", which your table says gets "bib": "IBM ibis bib". Then M, which maybe the table says leads to "bistro": "IBM ibis bib bistro". Then you've got a space, which you skip, and then the "i" in "ibis": "IBM ibis bib bistro ibis".
So you can see that the text you're creating creates itself, in some sense.
I have been working with this idea, off an on, for years now. I found the idea for it in Jackson Mac Low's poems, and in particular in those written around 1960 for what would become the book Stanzas for Iris Lezak. Take, for instance, the "3rd Asymmetry for Iris", which is reproduced in the new selected Mac Low, Thing of Beauty, but which doesn't seem to be online, so here are the first few lines:
Public understood by "logic" its childEtc. Mac Low here is, I believe, working through a source text, so he does not always get the same word for each instance of "u", which makes it a somewhat different computer program than Williams's. But what I'm most interested in here is this idea of expansion-by-alphabet.
upon NICKEL descent, endowed Republican source, to only orange duality.
Being Yard
long. Ordnance gives invalidates cost.
ICE to spent
cave human in lessons "different."
Us photosynthesis. On name
Negroes, Iowa come Kausika embarrass life
do explain steady contempts each not to
Of course, there's no reason why this method has to only connect a letter to a word -- the letter "a" could lead to an entire phrase, or to some other rule -- an "x" could lead to a rule of deleting the last three words, or a "h" could cause a switch to an entirely different table of correspondences. And the table dictates the frequency of the events in that table -- in most situations, an "e" is going to come up more often than a "q", but if you stack the table in a certain way, that might not be the case at all. So I've found it to be a very dynamic and useful tool for creating texts, and I'm glad that Nick brought to my attention another part of the history of this idea, and if there are other examples of work done along these lines, let me know.
A conversation from Silence, the John Cage mailing list. I have fixed a few typos.
...
From: Marjorie Perloff
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:10:47 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo?
I am trying to determine whether Cage ever had contact with his Oulipo contemporaries in Paris--e.g. Jacques Roubaud, George Perec, Harry Matthews? Since they like him use very complex constraints, it seems to be a reasonable affiliation but I can't find anything in the literature about this and Cage never talked about Oulipo when I knew him.
Best wishes,
Marjorie Perloff
...
[people comment about how Oulipians were against Cage, including me, along similar lines]
...
From: Chris Piuma
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:02:38 -0500
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo?
There are comments by Oulipians against Cage's chance techniques. The basic idea seems to be that chance techniques lead to "nonsense" and the whole trick with Oulipo is to squeeze some sense out when you're in a straightjacket. But there is an almost raving quality to the criticism I've read by them -- rejecting chance so completely that they probably missed some interesting opportunities! Certainly they missed the entire point of Cage, but even within their framework there are some interesting things that could be done with chance (and there are some post-Oulipians who have tried to synthesize the two ideas -- or at last, *I* have ;-)
I'd have to hunt down the specific reference I'm thinking of -- I think it's in Motte's anthology?
I imagine young Cage (maybe up to Sonatas & Interludes?) would have been interested in Oulipo, but by the time they started up his esthetic aims seem to be completely different.
Yrs,
Chris.
...
From: Marjorie Perloff
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:26:57 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2
Thanks, everyone, for your prompt and good responses. But I am not wholly convinced. True, Oulipo descried chance but what, in practice, is the difference between, say, a mesostic rule (even if the vertical strings are generated by chance operations) and the Oulipo N+7 rule, which is not "unchancy" in that different dictionaries would give you a different seventh noun after the N. Besides, Cage admits again and again that he changed the chance products "according to taste."
The key link may be Duchamp, who is connected to both camps. I will try to check more fully.
Marjorie Perloff
...
From: Chris Piuma
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:52:56 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2
It's not "according to taste" that's at issue, though -- it would be "to have it make sense". Hence the Oulipian shortened sonnet technique (under "redundancy" in the Compendium) -- it's not just the last word, or the last syllable, or the last n letters of each line that you take -- it's as little as you can while still retaining a syntactically "intelligible" or "normative" poem.
Duchamp did spectacularly little for Oulipo except perhaps lend his name and fame to the group; he's only recorded as attending one meeting, never wrote anything Oulipian, and his entry in the Oulipo Compendium suggests he was mostly in it for the puns. Plus he seems to have joined any group or scene that would allow him...
The mesostic rule -- when Cage was composing "freehand" in it, writing "normative" poems/lectures/sentences with it -- and when he was excluding the occurrence of a key letter between the previous key letter and the following one (oof, that's a complicated rule to describe; I hope you know what I mean) -- anyway, that is absolutely an Oulipian form. "Mesostic" isn't keyed in the Compendium, but it's
mentioned under "acrostic" with this parenthetical -- "John Cage published many mesostics dedicated to friends and colleagues" -- which are the "freehand" ones I was just describing, mostly, rather than, say, the Writings Through.
The N+7 is one of a number of Oulipo rules that allow for a certain measure of indeterminacy, but are still constructed so that their results are still, in some way, "sensical". But that is the real dividing line; one gets a sense from Oulipo that without the need for ending up with something "sensical", all their acrobatics are just calculations; which is the opposite of what Cage is doing.
But I'm happy to see you working on this; the synthesis of the two modes of thought is something I've been interested in for years.
I don't recall that you were at the noulipo conference last year; I seem to recall that this issue got lightly touched upon in a few of the presentations. I seem to remember Christian Bök talking about it, but I also remember him talking about something else, so... Hrm.
Yrs,
Chris.
...
After which she privately e-mailed me a note thanking me for my thoughts.
I have no idea if she has actually written on the Oulipo/Cage dynamic yet, although she mentioned Oulipo in connection with her book on "unoriginal genius".
...
At the symposium, Retallack mentioned an "N+0" technique, which is a great idea and one that I can't believe I haven't heard before.
...
I am now thinking of using this blog as a clearinghouse for things I have written (in various places) on poetry and poetics and whatnot. Let me try to remember where else I have written such things. It is, I assume, obvious why this exchange came to mind.